Re-Skilling: Enron and the white- collarization and financialization of the energy industry

In Risk and Ruin, Gavin Benke argues that we ignore Enron’s history and failures to our peril. The book provides a readable account that includes lots of rich history, institutional detail, and salacious anecdotes, making a convincing case for Enron as a harbinger of financial, environmental, and production crises yet to come in the first decades of the twenty-first century

The Financial Underpinnings of the EU Crisis: Financial Deregulation, Privatization, and Asymmetric State Power

This dissertation asks the following questions. How has financial liberalization affected the incidence of financial crisis in Europe? How have power asymmetries within Western Europe facilitated the process of financial liberalization, and distributed the costs and gains from this liberalization? How have these dynamics been demonstrated at the state level? It charts the institutional liberalization and privatization of European finance from the 1960s onward and presents a survey of descriptive statistics that show how different financial stability, financial flow, and macroeconomic variables have changed in Western Europe since the early 1980s, generally increasing financial and economic instability. It also demonstrates the change in securitization, and European banks’ tendencies to hold securitized assets on their balance sheets. An econometric investigation of the relationship between financial liberalization and the incidence of financial crisis shows that a statistically significant and positive correlation exists between international financial flows and the onset of financial crisis. It creates a framework for understanding the power dynamics between national, industrial, and class interests in Western Europe that promoted secular financial liberalization as well as the institutional design of the EMU that mandated financial liberalization. Finally, it examines the process of financial liberalization in detail in three states, Iceland, Ireland, and Germany. It finds ambiguous evidence that financial liberalization has helped these economies when comparing domestic class interests, or when comparing international interests

Rethinking the Theory of Money, Credit, and Macroeconomics: A Review Essay

This essay presents an overview and assessment of John Smithin\u27s 2018 book Rethinking the Theory of Money, Credit, and Macroeconomics. Smithin continues the projects of Keynes and Minsky with the aim of providing a general account what how the macroeconomy actually works. The essay evaluates Smithin\u27s alternative monetary model of the economy in the light of several key Post-Keynesian themes

Financial underpinnings of Europe\u27s financial crisis: Liberalization, integration, and asymmetric state power

This book analyzes how financial liberalization affected the development of the financial crisis in Europe, with particular attention given to the ways in which power asymmetries within Western Europe facilitated financial liberalization and distributed the costs and gains from it. The author combines institutional narrative analysis with empirical surveys and econometrics, as well as country-level studies of financial liberalization and its consequences before and after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis